


Being Someone

by peacocktails



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: Age Difference, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Past Sexual Abuse, Sexual Tension, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-03 06:52:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13335777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacocktails/pseuds/peacocktails
Summary: Luke discovers Rey's burgeoning Force connection with Kylo Ren - and, in an unexpected way, an unsettling part of her that allows Kylo in.(Content warning: Luke/Rey, slight Reylo, and discussion of slavery and child sexual abuse.)





	1. A Child Sometimes

He supposed it was a good thing that he could at least expect nothing conventional from her - except, maybe, when the conversation turned to his least favourite subject; the genealogy of the Jedi Order.

"Obi Wan Kenobi had no descendants, nor siblings," said Luke. "That's what he told me, anyway."

"Could he not perhaps have had reasons to lie about that?"

"Hey, he didn't lie," chuckled Luke bitterly. "He told me the truth _from a certain point of view_ , if you can buy that."

It had been an impatient day, for her, and she didn't want to take his cue to change the topic. "Did Shmi have any other children?" she pressed.

"There's no way to find out," he said. "The Republic didn't do censuses of slave births, marriages, or deaths, back then."

This fact seemed to surprise Rey, and she frowned almost imperceptibly. "Is there some reason..?"

"Because, with all the might of the old Star Destroyers, and a Jedi Order ten thousand strong, the slave-keeping territories were 'too far away'." She probably wouldn't appreciate it, but he wanted her to know. "There've been chattel slaves all throughout the time of the Republic, and always that excuse."

"I know," frowned Rey. "We do have holos on Jakku. Old propaganda, mostly."

"Beats Tatooine, in that case," said a side-eyed Luke.

 

The drizzle of the rain had turned to a shower, so in silence they made their way back up to the cooking hut. That morning, immediately before realising what was going on between her and Ren while she stared out from that rock, he'd assumed she'd been looking longingly again at his X-wing in the water. "I'd rather you didn't pick it up," he'd told her, standing some metres behind her, and was met with no response whatever. He'd realised in that time that what he'd said was maybe ill-advised, so he didn't repeat it in order to find out whether or not she'd heard him. Instead, he'd just listened until he was satisfied that the boy was no immediate danger.

Now they cooked in silence, too, sitting on the stone ledge ringing the wall, and tending the fire and iron pot in the centre. A fair distance away from the open flame, they watched and smelt the smoke rising up through the conical chimney. When the fire had been put out and the grain soup had been poured into their cups, Luke didn't drink, but set it on the floor beside him. He gritted his teeth, regretting already not doing sooner what he needed to do now.

"How could you bring yourself to let him speak to you? You know first hand how little he values you."

Rey straightened up, wide-eyed. She gulped down the soup already in her mouth. "But you're cut off from the Force!"

"I can make basic psychological inferences," he said. "You thought you'd just sneak him in, right in front of my nose?" A _hff_ through his nose. "I'm not _that_ old." Rey held her soup cup in her lap, looking down at the steam spiraling up. It barely hid the deepening flush of red on the tips of her cheeks. "Answer my question. He tortured you, didn't he?"

"Interrogated me. I wouldn't presume to call it torture," she said.

"What do you hope to achieve, in that case, by potentially giving away our location?"

  
It took a while, but he surprised her when she spoke - she seemed to rear up, and the words began to come in a flood. "He doesn't know what he's doing, either!" She took hold of her staff from where it leaned against the wall. "I've seen ambivalence inside him - internal conflict. He was scared in the interrogation cell, and he's just as scared today."

Did she expect him to be impressed? He hoped not. "Rey, with all due respect, Kylo Ren is a mass murderer. He's not related to you, he doesn't care about you - you have no leverage with which to reform him."

Her lips were pursed tight. He'd crossed a line, maybe, but he had every right to. "... As long as people have faith in the Resistance, I see no limit to what it can achieve."  
"No, no. Don't _kid_ yourself. You believe in the Resistance -"

She opened her mouth, but he raised a hand to silence her.

"You believe because you _have_ to believe. You have to believe that more Jedi - and thereby, more Sith, more violence - can solve everything." He shook his head.  
"Because this thing we call the Galaxy is just too - too _big_ \- to bring about justice for anyone except the people who wield the Force and the people who control the trade and destroyer fleets. There's just nothing else strong enough for people like you to hitch hope to. Any hope."

She didn't reply - actually, he noticed now that she'd turned her head away and lowered her stinging eyes as soon as he'd told her she had to believe. Let alone - part of him cringed inwardly - 'people like you'. 

 

A long pause, before her proud little voice came up from her throat. "You should use me."

He blinked, fixing her with an avian stare of shock.

"I was brought up on a nowhere planet to be used by people more important than me. That's the role I was given. ... If - if there's no justification for the vow of nonattachment. You know - if it's all just naive arrogance.." She glanced down at the point of her staff, pressed against the floor. She was scraping it softly back and forth against the stone, and gripping it with pressure, he noticed.

"I.. _they_ taught me to serve in any number of ways," she said, her knees together and drawn up, feet on tiptoes. "If you won't train me to do anything else properly. If you won't let me speak to anyone outside, as long as I'm here.. Just tell me what I'm to do, now." On her lips the corners of a shaking, unhinged smile. "Master Skywalker."

In his mind's eye, he saw the possibility of an outraged pall, or maybe of storming off. He heard in his own thoughts the inflection of Master Yoda: you're acting out. Control your emotions. He also saw that he was wrong. So, instead, he lowered his head and glanced off to the side, and verified what she wanted him to verify. "No. You're more than that."

Rey stepped forward - almost fell, and her staff clattered - and on her knees on the hard floor, wrapped her arms around his waist, and pressed her forehead against his warm stomach, her eyes squeezed shut.

  
"Oh.." he murmured. A muted sob into his robes - she was trying to hold them back, he could tell. "Oh." He laid his good hand on her upper back. She held him, unmoving - expectant? He began to stroke her back, awkwardly - would that maybe stop..? He sighed.

At his sigh, any sobs stopped, as if dammed up. His heart flashed and his shoulders tensed, as she moved forward, and, unclasping her hands from around his waist, crouched lower on her knees, and slid back slightly. Her hands were sliding onto his knees - she bent her head, pressed her forehead and nose against his thighs, and then closer inside, against the fabric. With frightening urgency, she reached at his robes, trying to find buttons or a belt. Manipulative, he thought. Indecisive; irresponsible -

_'Stop me!', she cries out. Hm hm hm. Let her play this game, you will?_

"Hey," he said softly. He tensed against her, drawing his knees away from her slightly as he tapped the stone seat-ledge beside him with his prosthetic hand. "Hey. Come up here." He'd only imagined Master Yoda's voice - as he was wont to do, these days - but it grated, regardless.

She paused, so he put his hands under her armpits and pulled her up to sit her down beside him on the ledge. He made deliberate eye contact. "We don't have to do things that way."

Curling forward with her elbows on her knees, she put her head in her hands. "Sorry. I suppose."

"Don't worry about it." He brushed a brown split end she'd left behind off his robes.

An uncomfortable lull in conversation passed in the sound of the wuthering rain outside, before Rey spoke. "In the interrogation cell in Starkiller Base -" she began, and swallowed - "I wanted to offer to him, like that. I didn't _want_ to do it, you understand! But, I .." Her fingers reached out for an explanation.

"Did it seem a kind of escape, from the situation - a way to temporarily change it into something - anything - else?"

She nodded. "By making him .. _want_ something like that, it seemed like I could make him less frightening."

He blinked, she thought, a little bit like a porg. "You aren't frightened of little old me, are you?" he said.

She didn't reply; she was just grimacing at the grey-blue stones in the floor.

"Hmm," he said, with a muddled expression he suspected was trying too hard to appear sage. "But you already know, don't you, that reacting in ways like that won't solve the underlying problems."

Rey nodded. "... I've wished so much that they are _someones_ ," she said, in a small voice. "I've wished so that I could almost believe it." It didn't help, Luke supposed, than Han had died so suddenly.

"Yeah," he said sympathetically. "Yeah." Suddenly Rey curled inwards, towards him. "Me too." He squeezed her upper arm as she shivered between heavy breaths. ".. And what I really mean by that is that I miss my aunt and uncle. I value them, now, more than I did." He gave her a smile; perhaps his first really warm and sincere one since she and Chewie had landed.

The dam burst; Rey's shoulders heaved with sobs.

 

When Luke's shoulder had gotten fairly soaked, Rey wiped her face with her hand. "Is there nothing you can do about this horrible world?"

"Rey.."

"Or that you can make me able to do?"

Luke refrained from sighing. "Rey, I can't give you a place in all this all on my own. I can't just say - zap -" he mimed the Emperor's lightning with his fingers " - you've got a destiny; you're meant for something really special."  
"But - this part of you that got hurt on Jakku.." he continued, "I don't want you to let Kylo Ren in on it. He might not even know what he's doing with it, but - really, it could quite easily be the death of you."

Rey sighed, this time. It wasn't what she'd wanted to hear - but he was glad she was willing to listen. As she sobbed childhood tears into his shoulder, he hoped the Millennium Falcon's facilities still worked. If only because her armwraps would have to be washed - she blew her streaming nose into them - thoroughly.

_Yes, yes. A child - a game. A child, we all sometimes must be._

Luke, from under a frown and lowered eyebrows, looked pointedly up at the cobblestone roof and the vaunting sky above it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It developed that I wrote this fic out of order. This is a middle chapter that takes place entirely in Rey's head (and is so far my favourite chapter).

Yes, a part of her was afraid of little old him. It was afraid of his shoulders, his masculine gait; of his beard, hiding a scar; of the warmth in his smile and the ice in the blue of his irises. It was afraid of the black leather glove on his right hand. It crouched at the thought of limbs sliced through like butter, or Sarlacc pits of horror childhood fancy, and the unknown insults of a time that had ended, before she was born, with an X-wing's engine gutted and a bird-like metal corpse left to disintegrate into the sea.   
  
It was afraid of his anger, because it knew she was bad.  
  
The anger of others had always made her want to placate. It clutched, firstly, around her ribs, or encircled her diaphragm; second it cued what the Jakku naturalists had called, in skittermice, avoidance behaviour. If escape was impossible - such as, for instance, if surrounded by water - it lastly ebbed, with sanguinous tendrils, towards the base of her spine, into the sacrum and the wings of the pelvis. Discomforting training. Uncanny.   
  
Even so, she'd ended up making a stab at sucking him off, or at least seeing if he was weak enough to allow her to. _Alright_ , he'd intimated, boredly, and refused - waved her like an insect away when she'd nosed at his midriff to show him that she could be good, namely, properly subservient. That wasn't the kind of good he'd let her be that day, or perhaps ever. Perhaps things were going to be alright.   
  
So, why were thoughts and feelings still so difficult to control?  
  
Lately she'd been putting out feelers involuntarily for things she suspected must scratch out under the surface. The Battle of Endor, for instance - she'd asked, in naive mien: hatred for one's parents - to her, incomprehensible - how must it feel to be actually tempted to patricide? Was it hard, when he went back to Tatooine?  
  
To the farmstead?  
  
Was he married, back then?  
  
Or after?  
  
The questions he handled in his particular species of taciturn grace: _honestly, really terrible; yes; yes; no, nor after_. But his outward equanimity was given the lie by his hands. _Before_ , he'd touch her to direct her when words would be too slow or unsubtle: manipulate her fingers to _hold the saberhilt like this_ ; press her hands together in his to illustrate the precise depth of pressure for the droid-mending meditation. Sitting on the rock with closed eyes, she'd tried again to reach out into the Force: on the third failed try, she twitched - he'd taken her wrists, to cross her elbows over her chest and put her hands on her shoulderblades. "Hug yourself," he had said - _or I'll do it for you_ \- _try again, now_.  
  
There was a quiet reluctance, now, however. In touching; in everything. She'd created a chilling effect.  
  
Her funny friend, isolation, began coming to visit her again: to paw at the edges and circle like a carrion bird. Truthfully, she hated Luke for chaining himself to it: for hurting Leia and not to mention himself. An acidic thought: even Ben Solo fought the thing. Luke, it seemed, did not understand that nothing could shake her belief in the strength it showed to reach beyond oneself; to suck oneself out of the mires of protective apathy. She shouldn't blame him, though, she thought with conscious self-pity. He had had Wedge Antilles and Biggs Darklighter where she had had an empty helmet and a straw doll.  
  
Still, his refusal to fight was just why he was so frightening.  
  
He had the power to put her back into grey normality - the dying Resistance campaign, if not her AT-AT; a nightmare future in which Finn, Chewbacca, and BB-8 were killed in battle. "Just tell me they'll be spared", she'd pleaded, sobbing, on that bad night. He'd favoured her with apprehensive sympathy: "I can tell how much they mean to you".  
  
She could tell him how the Irving Boys had fucked her from behind for five credit; might he like her to talk about that?  
  
"But we can't be certain of anything, in war."   
  
Anger and death.  
  
There was a way to be certain. A vision of Kylo and the Knights of Ren taking their revenge on the little village. It had been the Irving's little boyhood village. Planet killers, they certainly were - but not any more, now that Base had been destroyed. Sacrifice herself and conscience to protect her friends and assuage Solo. Kiss him; he'd wanted her hard enough to. Why else play memory records for her in a torture chair?  
  
But she knew those lips were twice poisoned. There was the Dark Side, of course, but also - shamefully - his respect she'd lose at once by giving in so easily. No, she had wanted respect since she was vulnerably small, and that was why she allowed this Force bond to continue. But he only respected the big and strong. It was a self-frustrating desire: for him to somehow break her - break into her - against her every wish and effort.  
  
Luke had been pressing her gently about him. "What did he say to you?" Luke could be paternal, too, warm and sweet like ketel bread made just for her. "As much or little as you'd like." Like coaxing a baby raptor to swallow its food. It was bait to make her want to eat.  
  
She told him everything, for the sake of the Resistance. But that wasn't what she'd like. Rich food sickens a starving thing. She wanted the gloves to come off and the cold light to come over his eyes as he held down her mind with his mind, used the Jedi's tricks to scare, to frighten the badness out of her. She wanted Master Skywalker to show his anger. And she wanted him not to know she wanted that, because it wasn't what he might think it was: because it was about wanting not to fight any more, and wanting no more subtlety and unpredictability, long before it was about sex or even belonging.  
  
If it even was about sex at all.  
  
He'd been probing, too, about Finn. She was missing him. Wasn't she?  
  
It would be nice to see more than a brother in Finn when light had caught on the bloodstained helmet in his open hands and he had shown her, again and again in Starkiller Base, small desert flowers of blessed kindness. She wanted that very much; enough to make her very sad, sometimes. But it seemed like her eyes were too otherwise hungry: they looked for parents, everywhere. He would understand; of course he would accept her - but because _he_ wanted guidance, too, and a just authority figure. Wasn't that why he'd left the Order? He was tired of squashing down resentment.  
  
Yes. She didn't say it, but she missed a time before memory, when nothing had yet been made dirty or fraught. She reminded herself, instead, that Luke was referring to the _Jedi_ whenever he said, with voice or frown or shaken head: _stop trying to salvage it. Throw it away._ He wasn't referring to things between them, or to her, or to the pilot doll she feared would rot in the planet's moisture.

Should she tell him she did that?  
  
It was the way of all things: only if she took the doll out of the Falcon's hold for the porgs to possibly destroy was there a chance that Luke could surreptitiously be made aware of it.  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People who don't understand the Force suffer by it.  
> (Content warning for CSA and slavery flashbacks. Poor Rey. Please do take care of yourselves out there.)

_Too slow. Not enough. Not useful for any make that flies in this sector. You call that copper?_  
  
_Looks like dried Ronto shit. Just put it behind the tent over there._  
  
_I don't like it._  
  
...  
  
...  
  
_Quickly. Quickly! Before he thinks better._  
  
...  
  
_Look how weak I can make him._  
  
_Look how much I can make him_ want.  
  
_Almost funny - pathetic._  
  
_When I'm grown up, I won't have to control people like this._  
  
_I'll use the Force._  
  
_(But I know that'll never happen.)_  
  


* * *

  
  
Sitting on the threadbare porgfeather mattress, Rey looked up at Luke, and rested her hands in her lap underneath the woolen coverlet from the Millennium Falcon.  
  
"So, do you want Chewie to do it?" Luke asked.  
  
He was glad for small mercies: if she hadn't shown him this _thing_ inside her that she was half aware of, then he'd have had told her to leave Ahch-To as soon as he'd caught them together again.  
  
He could tell himself he hadn't meant to annihilate the hut, that he'd just gotten rusty after so long. He'd be kidding himself, though. Kylo Ren had been _there_ \- what was he supposed to have done; let him slaughter them both and take Ahch-To's co-ordinates for his Supreme Leader?

He'd been very willing to forgive the young woman who trained with him on the rock - he knew she was proud; compassionate; reasonable. But the girl who'd ignored his warning - the girl who clung to past hurt, who could convince herself of anything, and who covertly tested people - had gotten it in her mind long ago that Kylo Ren could be, if not redeemed, then at least enlisted under that pretense in her campaign to sabotage her better self.

He should have told her that, before he told her about his failure at the old Temple - perhaps it would have helped her put things in perspective. (Instead, she'd almost put a lightsaber through his chest.)

He was looking down, now, at the two day old bandages wrapped around her chest and her entire midriff, unpleasantly damp with pale yellow-red. Of course she couldn't have been expected to know anything about how dangerous wielding a lightsaber could be - he'd realised that with horror, and as soon as her parry slipped and she'd sustained the gash. She'd broken the resultant fall on her right wrist - which made him wonder with no small measure of horror, too, how much pedagogical forethought on Kenobi's part had gone into that arm amputation in Mos Eisley.  
  
"You don't want Chewbacca to find out how I was injured," she stated, accurately.  
  
Luke glanced to the battered steel bath next to the bed. "What I want isn't really important, right now," he said, favouring her with a terse smile. "What about you?"  
  
Rey exhaled, and paused. "I don't want him to find out, either. ..I understand that you might not want to tell him about the Temple. And, I don't want to tell him about us fighting. So, it'd be about Ben Solo, and my mind. And hence embarrassing."  
  
"So, not Chewie?"  
  
"No."  
  
Luke nodded, and went back outside, where the filled wooden buckets were. From behind the stone wall she heard him pour out the water into one of the cooking pots. Then knelt down - she heard his knees crack - and lit a fire underneath it with some of Han's spare cooking fluid and a sparker.  
  
The bath below her really was tiny. Tempting to try to lift herself up and try to undress and get in and be done with it; but then, she supposed that the water would be boiling when it went in.  
  
When he returned, she was still under the blanket, but her trousers and underclothes were on the floor. Ignoring this, he filled the bath with hot and cold buckets, and then nodded to it for her to get in. She stood, and with one hand tried to pull up the cotton strips wrapped around her lower abdomen, apparently so they wouldn't get wet.  
  
"No, let's just -" his fingers touched her abdomen, and she held tense and still as he untied her dressings in the way that he'd tied them when she was unconscious. "There." He didn't tell her that people getting cut up like this was part and parcel of training: she'd resent it, of course, as a trivialisation of their conflict.  
  
She gritted her teeth before she stepped in, but to her surprise it wasn't too hot, so she knelt down. And immediately winced: _saltwater_ lapped the deep uncovered gash down her abdomen. She sighed out the pain, and to avoid putting either pressure or heat on her right wrist, she held her forearms up in front of her like a yam'rii.  
  
 "Put your arm out straight," Luke said, touching the point of her elbow. She frowned, but complied. The straps holding the splint in place had loosened; he re-tied and tightened them.  
  
Her arms folded back into yam'rii position as soon as he let go, which irritated him. If she wanted to hide her breasts, why not just hide them?  
  
"Really, I'm pretty used to this kind of thing," he said, dipping the small washtowel he'd brought into the last bucket full of hot water. "..You know, I was the designated vet, back home? Whenever somebody came by with a pregnant bantha, or something." He chuckled. "Lots and lots of amniotic fluid."  
  
Rey forced a smile. She supposed he meant well, but being compared to a domestic animal reminded her of bad things.  
  
Then: "Ah!!" She sucked in a sharp breath as the wet flannel touched her open gashes. Then she found herself forced to inhale and exhale deep through her nose: Luke had begun wiping away the congealed blood and pus. She closed her eyes through the pain, and tried not to flinch away from the towel, or his dispassionate, clinical hands as they moved over her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him unsmiling and tense. It reminded her of unhappy times; voices from Jakku.

_They're naked so as people can 'spect 'em. Better keep away._

Apparently she'd started bleeding again - his metal fingers touched her back, to steady her posture, and he pressed and held the almost-boiling towel against the deepest part of the gash. She had almost gotten used to the pain when he removed the towel and wrung it out into the bathwater.

She squeezed her arms to her sides as he brought the boiling water back to the lower part of the gash.  
  
"Rey, I can tell you're worried that I'm enjoying this in a way you don't want me to," he said, as he felt her begin to shiver underneath his hand on her back. "That's okay."  
  
_But, is that why you chose this?_ he reflected. _Because you can speak to me; because I'm human, too? With Chewie, there's nothing to fear._

He wondered if he should communicate that point in any way. No - too close - why give something only to have to take it away any day now? He wondered also when last - if ever - she'd been touched by a man in a disinterested, nurturing way.  
  
"I would imagine my father's hand on my shoulder," Rey supplied, apparently guilelessly. "And my mother, holding my hands. It used to be a good enough way to resolve worries." The towel had cooled down somewhat, now.

 _Hinting_ , again, Luke thought. It irritated him. But, he'd take the bait. "Used to?"  
  
"Well, until I met Kanata."  
  
"Ah. Of course."  
  
Rey remembered now that her dream last night had had familiar elements - 'quickly', feeling upset. It might have just been from the blood and fever - but could it have already been latent, somehow, when she and Ben had touched? Could he have taken it?

She remembered Ben's hand against hers, a contact almost electric. He hadn't even been touching her when the heat from his fingers by her temple had drawn out the vision of the island.  
  
"Whew," Luke whistled, at the sheer volume of dead white and red blood cells in the water. "I think we're going to need another tub."  
  
"Hm? Where are you going?" _So tense_ , he thought, as he left.  
  
"To refill the buckets," he called over his shoulder. He could see that her mind was open, right now, to being covertly assuaged. But that would be a pretty stupid move. Definitely not educative.  
  
Rey's legs underneath her were falling asleep, so she shifted to a sit. She realised that Luke was likely able to extract any or all of her reflections and the feelings associated with them. She doubted highly that he'd choose to, but nonetheless determined to guard her mind.

There had been something else in her dream, she remembered, too: she'd imagined being nobody, nowhere for him. She'd imagined cringing on the ground again, and clinging up at his long robes - of hating herself, and being hated, and it felt safe and familiar.

It seemed to be a potentially realisable outcome. She knew very well how to pretend to enjoy things, and to pretend to enjoy pretending not to enjoy things. To make her hands appear eager, to push out her chest or bottom, or to part her lips in just the right way. Every scavenger and trader had had some insistent 'idiosyncrasy': most of them in fact fairly stereotypic, she'd discovered. She really didn't like how much the idea amused her of rooting out his, and examining it like a rock in the light of what she knew of his story.

Horrible, if he let her. But, everyone had .. they had let themselves. She hated them for their weakness, and the vacant, bestial expression in their eyes.

Perhaps, though, he wouldn't be like that. Perhaps she'd be gotten the better of in some way, instead.

 _Being a slave means that you belong to someone_ , she imagined or remembered her parents (her parents??) explaining.  
  
"Good thing I changed into _old_ old clothes for this, huh?" came Luke's voice as he re-entered with an empty and a full bucket. She suppressed the thoughts, and abruptly stood up as he brought the empty bucket into the bath to scoop out the dirty water.  
  
"Thank you," she remembered to say, as he poured in a fresh bucket.  
  
"Don't mention it," he half-muttered. She knelt down again, and with her good hand washed away some of the blood-dirty water that had already dried up on her skin.  
  
On Jakku all men had given in, she thought. Why should a man from Tatooine be really that different, in the end?  
  
"Do you want to know -" Luke began.  
" _Yes, I do_."  
"- a funny story of the time .."

His voice trailed off. Then he held her eyes curiously - not searchingly - and then her guard cracked. A split second later, he was visibly taken aback. He raised his eyebrows; paused. "... Because, while most of it might have been them, some of it might have been _you_ , with mind tricks."  
  
The vacancy in their eyes. Rey felt the hair on the back of her arms and neck prick up.  
  
_I see, now_ , she thought, unguarded. _The Force can distort a person's understanding of the world._  
  
"Mm-hmm," Luke said.


End file.
